Personality

• Personality is a complex hypothetical construct.

Consistency and Distinctiveness
• What does it mean to say that my friend has an optimistic personality? • Fairly consistent tendency to behave in a cheerful, hopeful, enthusiastic way. • Consistency across situations lies at the core of the personality.

• Personality is used to explain Why not every one acts the same in similar situations. • Example: Three persons stuck in an elevator and their responses were different.

• Distinctiveness:
– The behavioral differences among people reacting to the same situation
.• Consistency:
– The stability in a person‟s behavior over time and across situations.

• To identify the basic traits psychologists have been working.• Most approaches to personality assume that some traits are more basic than others. • Raymond Rattel – Factor analysis – 16 basic traits of personality
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you are considered agreeable.
.1. Agreeableness
• How do you react to others‟ opinions? • When you agree to them easily.

. • You prove an excellent team member. sympathetic and forgiving. • You strive to bring harmony amongst your mates. approachable. • You can ignore your own needs for others. You are friendlier. • You are considered as tolerant.• A Higher Degree in ‘A’ • good natured. agreeable and courteous.

• The psychology is one of the best fields for you.
. • You are easily influenced. • You prefer to work in background. • You keep your opinions to yourself to avoid conflict.• However. • But you are a born social reformer. you are not a good leader. • You can prove an excellent teacher.

• • • • •
A Lower Degree in ‘A’ critical. You don‟t hide your reactions. analytical and tough. • You can challenge.
. You want your efforts and achievements to be acknowledged. You are expressive in your opinions.

callous and self-centered person. you may not prove a good team leader. • You are viewed as hostile. • Your love for power can lead you to be an autocrat.
. – public administration – and management are the best career dimensions for you. • Extreme degrees qualify you as a rude. • You are not considered cooperative.• However. Military leadership. • Suitable Careers:
– where you are given freedom to exercise your will.

2: Openness to Change
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2: Openness to Change
• open for change when you accept new thoughts.
. ideas and changes.

• You believe that change is more than essential for social evolution.• A Higher Degree in ‘O’ • You qualify to be counted as original and creative. novelty and originality is involved. • Suitable careers: where a lot of creativity. • You always build a big picture but tend to ignore vital details.
. technologies and tools with great ease. • You love revolutions. • You enjoy complexities of things and strive to find out their solutions. • You can handle new systems.

You spend a lot of time on details.
. You can execute plans very well. You are traditional. secure jobs and serene family life.• • • • • •
A Lower Degree in ‘O’ Resistant to change. You love peaceful environment.

• You can prove a good judge. • You accept change only when there is no way out.
.• However. accountant and auditor. • Your focus on details may cause you to ignore big picture. • The careers where rules and regulations are to be followed very strictly are considered suitable for you. No one can be better financial manager than you. you are not a good planner.

3: Extraversion
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3: Extraversion
• Do you love gatherings? • Or you prefer solitude? • Five factor model of personality considers your preferred way to handle your environment very important.
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friendlier and talkative. • You prefer to lead others. • You are often assertive and energetic.
. • You are charismatic. • You can do many tasks successfully at a time.• A Higher Degree in ‘E’ • The five factor model considers you social.

• You are considered fit for
– politics. – sales – and public related careers. you rely upon others without knowing them very well.• However.
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You keep your secrets to your self.• • • • • •
A Lower Degree in ‘E’ You are considered private. • Production management. You are often quiet. You prefer environment where you can work alone. serious and skeptic. natural sciences and art related careers are considered suitable for you. You don‟t rely on others easily.
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• You plan things and follow that route strictly.4: Conscientiousness
• How do you take your work?
• A Higher Degree in ‘C’ • organized. focused and timely achiever of your goals.
. • You are not easy to be distracted.

• You are considered confident. you tend to be workaholic.
. • You often prove a strong executive in any organization.• However. • You are self-disciplined. dutiful and reliable.

you are not considered good for projects where deadlines are to be followed.
. • You don‟t plan things and pursue your goals with a flexible approach. • Some day you work a lot and other day you go on vacations.• A Lower Degree in ‘C’ • careless. relaxed and unorganized. • You are spontaneous. • However.

• You are reactive and often fail to recover from depression shock easily. you may be advised clinical treatment. • You are inflamed easily.
. unstable and vulnerable to negative emotionality.5: Neuroticism
• How do you handle depression?
• A Higher Degree in ‘N’ • Nervous. • In extreme cases. • You always feel a need for stability. • You are never satisfied with your life.

finance management and engineering. • You are a valuable candidate for careers in air traffic. strong nerved and composed person. controllers and airline pilots.• A Lower Degree in ‘N’ • Emotionally stable.
. • You are often satisfied with your life. • You are often calm and optimist. • You recover from depression periods very easily. • You can find out the best out of the worst. • You love peace and security.

Required healthy verbal interactions with patients
. on unconscious motives and conflicts and methods people use to cope with sexual and aggressive urges.
Theory explains: • Motivation •Personality •Psych: Disorders
By focusing on: The influence of early childhood experiences.• Devoted himself to treatment of mental disorders using Psychoanalysis.

.Structure of personality
• Freud divided personality structure into three components:
– The ID – The Ego – The Superego – Freud said: A person‟s behavior is outcomes amongst these three components.

• The ID:
• Is the primitive (prehistoric), instinctive (inborn, natural) component of personality that operates according to the pleasure principle. • Pleasure Principle, which demands immediate gratification (satisfaction, fulfillment) of its urges (to eat, to sleep etc). • The ID engages in primary-process thinking, which is primitive, illogical, irrational and fantasy oriented.

• The Ego:
– Is decision making component of personality that operates according to the reality principle.

– The Ego considers social realities-society‟s norms, etiquette, rules and customs-in deciding how to behave. – Reality Principle: which seeks to delay gratification of the id‟s urges until appropriate outlets and situations can be found.

• In short, to stay out of trouble, the ego often works to tame the unbridled (uncontrolled) desires of the id. • In the long run, the ego wants to maximize gratification, just as the id does. • The Ego engages in secondary process thinking, which is relatively rational, realistic, and oriented toward problem solving.

• The Superego:
– Is moral component of personality that incorporates social standards about what represents right and wrong.

• An argument you had with a friend yesterday.
.• The Preconscious
• Contains material just beneath the surface of awareness that can easily be retrieved.

– The Unconscious: • the lack of consciousness or responsiveness to people and other environmental stimuli
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• Humans seek to reduce anxiety through defense mechanisms
. in order to reduce feelings of anxiety. • Anxiety : an aversive inner state that people seek to avoid or escape. the human is driven towards tension reduction.• In Freud's view.

problem solving efforts are increases • and Secondly.
. • When some type of anxiety occurs. the mind responds in two ways : • First.• Defense Mechanisms Unconscious reactions that protect a person from unpleasant emotions such as anxiety and guilt. defense mechanisms are triggered. These are tactics which the Ego develops to help deal with the ID and the Super Ego.

transform. or falsify reality in some way. reducing the psychological tension felt by an individual.• All Defense Mechanisms share two common properties : • They can operate unconsciously • They can distort.
• The changing of perceived reality allows for a lessening of anxiety. •
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Repression does not have to be total.
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.• Advantages :
• • Can prevent inappropriate ID impulses from becoming behaviors. Can prevent unpleasant thoughts from becoming conscious. What an individual represses depends upon cultural expectations and the particular development of an individuals super-ego.
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Can prevent memories of things we have done wrong from resurfacing. partial memories where only the single piece of damaging information is "forgotten" is common.

still setting the table for him.
. and yet refuses to believe it.Denial
• When people are overwhelmed by the anxiety present within a situation. a mother receives word that her Son has been killed. keeping his room and clothes current. they can engage in even more severe form of memory repression : Denial
• In Denial. the individual denies that the threatening event even took place ! • In war.

and automatically assuming the professor made a grading error. despite it being very apparent to everyone around them. Alcoholics and other Substance Abusers who refuse to admit they have a problem.•
At school.
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Denial becomes more difficult with age. as the ego matures and understands more about the "objective reality" it must operate within. a student seeing a grade of "C" next to their name.
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Repression and Denial are the two main defense mechanisms which everybody uses.

anxiety is reduced by claiming another person actually has the unpleasant thoughts that you are thinking. lets say that you do not like someone. You are attributing your own repressed thoughts to someone else. • These thoughts from your parents become embedded in your super ego. and to be friendly to everyone.Projection
• In projection. • Your mother and father always told you to treat other people well. • For example.
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• If you allow this thought to consciously surface. instead of consciously thinking the anxiety provoking thought " I do not like this person" . this defense mechanism allows for the non-anxiety provoking thought • "This person does not like me "
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• So.• You discover that you do not like this person. you will experience moral anxiety in terms of guilt feelings. because this conscious thought goes against the moral prohibitions of your super ego.

• Possible Rationalization : It is better that I hold onto this money or the government will spend it on weapons of mass destruction. anyways.
• Fail to get into law school • Possible Rationalization : I didn't want to pursue that career. •
. • Rationalization helps to protect our sense of self-esteem • Rationalization is closely tied to the Self-serving Bias : The tendency to interpret success as inwardly achieved and to ascribe failure to outside factors.

• Separating oneself from the emotional content of an event. • Intellectualization protects against anxiety by repressing the emotions connected with an event.
.• Intellectualization
• Thinking about events in cold. focusing instead on the facts. rational terms. hard.

and that intellectualization allows for the conscious analysis of non-anxiety provoking information about an event. • Freud believed that memories could have both conscious and unconscious aspects.• For example. prognosis. treatment options.
. a wife who learns her husband is dying tries to learn all she can about the disease. By doing this she can help repress the emotional onslaught of feelings of loss and anger which can accompany the death of a loved one.

• Someone with an oral fixation may increase their cigarette smoking of lollipop licking behavior when stressed at work.
. • Regression is the giving up of mature problem solving methods in favor of child like approaches to fixing problems.• Regression
• Regression can occur when an individual is faced with high levels of stress in their life.

.• This regression represents a way of relating to the world that was formerly effective.
• Regression is a way to try to recapture some childhood satisfaction.

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. • They feel anger and hostility toward their supervisor.• Displacement
• Displacement is the shifting of intended targets. especially when the initial target is threatening. • An individual is "dressed down" by the supervisor at their job.

• The Ego.
. being reality based and very much in favor of continued paychecks. would like to tear the boss's head off. but still has this aggressive impulse. • The person goes home.• Their ID. realizes that this is not a good idea and therefore does not remove boss's head. driven by aggressive impulses.

since it feels this will not threaten future paychecks. now angry and upset. who then becomes angry and kicks their pet dog. displaces their anger on their child.
. • The spouse. a further displacement of anger.• The Ego allows for the individual to scream (shout) at the spouse.

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Oral
• The oral stage is the first stage of Freud's stages of psychosexual development. during which the child is forced to become less dependent upon caretakers. • According to Freud. lasting from birth to 18 months.
. The major conflict issue during this stage is the weaning process. the mouth is the primary erogenous zone through which pleasure is derived. A fixation at this stage can result in problems with dependency or aggression.

. • The major conflict issue during this stage is toilet training.Anal
• lasting from age 18 months to three years. • A fixation at this stage can result in a personality that is too rigid or one that is too disordered.

• The primary conflict at this stage is a desire to possess the opposite-sex parent. • Completion of this stage results in identifying with the same-sex parent.
.Phallic
• lasting from age three years to six years.

Genetal / Latency
• begins during puberty • During this stage. • Contribute to society through working
. and caring adult. the individual develops a strong interest in the opposite sex. warm. • If the other psychosexual stages have been successfully completed. the individual will develop into a well-balanced.

Develops socially constructive goals
.• Adler
– We can control our own fate – View of individual: striving for perfection.

Early childhood experiences can have powerful influences on adult personality 4. Internal conflict often plays a key role in generating psychological distress. People do use defense mechanisms to reduce their experience of unpleasant emotions.Evaluating Psychodynamic Perspectives
1. Unconscious forces can influence behavior 2. 3.
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punishment.
• Environment consequences-reinforcement.F. and extinction-determines people‟s patterns of responding.
. • He believed that most human responses are shaped by operant conditioning.• B. Skinner:
• Viewed personality as “Collection of response tendencies that are tied to various stimulus situations.

. external environmental events. • Reciprocal determinism is the idea that internal mental events. and overt behavior all influence one another.Bandura‟s Social Learning Theory
• Also called „social cognitive theory‟.

• Humans are neither masters of their own destiny nor hapless victims buffeted about by the environment.• Self-efficacy:
– The expectancy that one‟s efforts will be successful.
. instead. the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes.

bonus. • Social Learning Theory: people make responses that they think will lead to reinforcement in the situation in hand. rewards • Hard work = no any change in your job status. • Hard work = promotion.Mischel and the Person-Situation Controversy
• An advocate of Social Learning Theory.
. • Consistency of Human behaviors across varying situations.

• Social learning theory states that “people will often behave differently in different situations. • Studies show that a person who is honest in one situation may be dishonest in another. • Situational specificity
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• Unique qualities of Humans
– Freedom – Potential for personal growth
.• Any personality theory that asserts the fundamental goodness of people and their striving toward higher levels of functioning.

and typical behavior.
. unique qualities. – It‟s a collection of self perceptions.
– Your self concept is your own mental picture of yourself.Carl Rogers-Person Centered Theory
• The Self
– A self-concept is a collection of beliefs about one‟s own nature.

• Incongruence is the degree of disparity between one‟s self-concept and one‟s actual experience.
. • The development of self.
• Parents conditional love.

. deny. • How she will protect her self-concept. • A young women receiving feedback from her friends that she is „self-centered‟ lady.• Anxiety and defense:
• The more inaccurate your self-concept is the more likely you are to have experiences that clash with your self-perception. and twist reality to protect and perpetuate their self-concept. • They ignore.

which is the need to fulfill one‟s potential. • Self-Actualization.
.Maslow‟s Theory of Self-Actualization
• Hierarchy of needs. he must be”. • “what a man can be.

• Eysenck‟s Theory:
– “Personality is determined to a large extent by a person‟s genes”.
– Conditionability
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